New Horizons Learning Centers
The SPCUG has come up with a few things over the years that worked fairly well, but required far too much in terms volunteer support. He has been working New Horizons Learning Centers, a world-wide company, the local Sacramento center located on Howe Ave. They have put together a package of training opportunities that are typically offered to large corporations and government divisions.
New Horizons has been generous to the SPCUG by allowing our special interest groups to use their classrooms for our meetings. Currently, three of our groups meet there at no charge. New Horizons has further tightened our relationships by offering this exceptional discount to our members.
Ed Gans of New Horizons will discuss not only their live classroom offerings, but also their "Online Anytime" Web-based instruction. Online Anytime includes both instructor-lead message-board style of classes as well as the more common self-paced training. All of New Horizon’s offerings are available in the Online Anytime environment.
"It’s great to hear a grassroots kind of organization where people are getting together, asking questions, sharing ideas and experiences. It’s a real nice change for myself and our company. In many cases, what we do is corporate training – whether it’s our own programs or developing custom programs for our clients. But it’s great to see people helping each other out.
"New Horizons is an international company, listed on the NASDAQ, with 300 or so centers in the United States, and a number of centers just recently opened in China and India.
"In addition to our instructor-lead training, what we found is something that’s nice to add in today’s economy, today’s environment, is training that’s more ‘on demand,’ as you need it, giving you exactly what it is you need to learn and when you need to learn it vs. sitting in a SQL Server five day seminar.
"Suppose you already know the subjects that are going to be covered in the first two days. What we came up with, which is very timely the way it worked out, is an on-line training product whereby you can get the exact same class as you would in the live classroom setting. One mode of instruction is self-paced meaning that you can move very quickly through subject matter you are already skilled at, and devote more time to those areas requiring additional study.
"The other mode of on-line study is through a ‘virtual’ classroom. This environment is more or less ‘live’ where the student can communicate via Voice-over-IP with the instructor and any other students logged on at that time. Using this method, New Horizons can offer classes that are attended by students across the nation, having class sizes that would otherwise fail to generate enough local interest.
"In developing a partnership with the Sacramento PC Users Group, we think what would be really nice is to offer a ‘tool’ whereby members can enhance their knowledge and skills so that better communication and information about technical issues can be addressed within the group. In so doing, we’ve established a significant discount on several of the New Horizons training packages.
Ed Gans introduced Steve, New Horizons eLearning Product Manager for the Pacific Region, who demonstrated the Online Anytime web-based training environment.
"I’ve logged into a demo account that lists over 3700 courses available, depending on the package subscription. We have training for everything from the most basic of computer skills to global fiber network technologies. I will show just a little bit of what our eLearning campus can do.
"The eLearning environment starts with the ‘My Courses’ page. It displays the syllabus of selected courses and keeps track of everything you are studying. In the industry, we call this ‘just in time learning.’ You can jump into a title and find exactly that which you want to learn, click on it, read an overview of the lesson plan, and you can navigate through the course at your own speed, choosing only those lessons necessary for your purposes.
"The New Horizons courses often provide animated tutorials, many provide interactive simulations of popular software titles, and some give you terminal access to live systems. If, for whatever reason, you need to study an application though its many incarnations, we have that available. You can learn about Excel 97 through Excel 2002, DOS and Windows 95 through Windows XP. In development are courses for Office 2003. The My Courses page is dynamic. As new courses are published, they show up in your library.
"Ed mentioned that we have hundreds of locations world-wide. We have hundreds of instructors available to answer your questions. For 20 years, New Horizons has been teaching computer-oriented instruction in our classrooms. For about 18 of those years, we published our own courseware.
"Lately, we have partnered with companies that also publish courseware, much of it better than ours. One such company is Element-K, a publishing arm of Ziff-Davis Publishing. We also have a well-stocked "24/7 Reference Library," the books completely viewable through the Adobe Acrobat Reader. You could, if it were practical, print our entire library to your own personal physical library. In less than a dozen classes are you required to purchase books not in our 24/7 Library or other courseware.
"As I said, your progress through any and all coursework is tracked. You can place ‘bookmarks’ in the coursework and in the reference materials.
"Our experience has shown that, by teaching people how to use computers, it’s always best to have an instructor. Instructor-lead classes is probably the best modality. But it’s not always convenient. Therefore, we created content parity in all of our course offerings. You can start a self-paced course, work through it in any way you wish, study the reference books as needed, then join a ‘virtual classroom’ for interactive discussion with an instructor and fellow students if necessary. And just like a real class, there will be assignments and homework. Therefore, for most instructor-lead classes, you will need to own your own copy of the software and/or hardware. Our courses have been accredited and you could earn Continuing Education Units (CEU’s).
"As I mentioned earlier, many courses give you terminal access to live systems. These ‘virtual labs’ or ‘v-labs,’ offer an enhanced training environment above simulations. Real-world, hands-on experience is often times more valuable than certification alone.
"Our v-labs are structured, real-world problem solving exercises mapped to Microsoft technical exams. The v-labs are not simulations. You place a request to execute a particular v-lab exercise, You are given an appointment time, a technician sets up a system (it does not matter where this machine is physically located), and you have one hour to complete the lab.
"For example, you wish to install and configure SQL Server 2000 on an IBM AS400. Not many people have this software and equipment laying about their garage. You will be administrating real software on real equipment, consuming real CPU time, making real, otherwise very costly mistakes. That is, if your solution to the problem presented to you is to reformat the hard drive, then do it. (Hints to the appropriate solution are available.) V-labs are not repeatable without additional costs.
"In development, due for release Summer of 2003, is a complete .NET set of v-labs. Students will terminal access to systems running VB development environments, write code, compile, and test (and crash).
"New Horizons have also put ‘Online Live’ real-time lectures and seminars. If the vendor sponsoring the seminar provides curriculum materials, we will send a copy of those materials to you as well. If you don’t have a headset with microphone already, we provide you one. On your computer display, there will be a small control panel that will signal the lecturer that: you wish to speak, your answer is yes, or no. I am going to show you an archive of one such seminar on Microsoft’s Active Directory. This seminar is actually five days long, all day long. For the archive, we have chopped it up into several two hour-long streaming videos, each segment viewable independent of the others. (Online Live is not part of the SPCUG discounted packages.)
"Remote attendance at an online seminar also includes terminal access to your own computer to perform your experiments, just as if you attending in person with equipment assigned to you and set up at your seat.
"The instructors for our scheduled instructor-lead seminars are available 30 minutes before and 30 minutes after classtime. In addition to that, they have ‘office hours’ as well as registered students being provided with mail services to communicate with the instructor.
"Keep in mind that modem dial-up connections are at a serious disadvantage, particularly when it comes to remote terminal access to your equipment." Many of the courses use Shockwave for animations. This is not the same as Flash, which you may already have the plug-in installed for your browser. You will need to install Macromedia’s "Shockwave for Director" plug-in. Support Services at Element-K also claim that certain firewalls, browser proxies, real-time anti-trojan scanners, and real-time anti-virus scanners may render parts of the Javascript-based control panels inoperative.
"We are offering the New Horizons training packages to you at near cost. As a service to your group, the SPCUG members are getting a great deal. Your cost is roughly 40-50% of retail."
Dennis Duffy comments, "Typically, discounts are offered to those members who attend that particular evening’s presentation. New Horizons has agreed to test the interest in these classes by SPCUG member by making these discounts available for 12 months. At any time during the next 12 months, any SPCUG member in good standing can take advantage of the New Horizons special pricing. Your access also permits your immediate family members to also to participate in any of the available classes. Tell your friends that by joining SPCUG, they could save hundreds of dollars in training costs."
Steve continues, "These training packages are subscriptions to Online Anytime for one year. We are offering three packages: ‘Office Productivity ($95),’ ‘Computer Professional ($495-and for tonight only, includes Office Productivity, which is not normally part of the package),’ and ‘IT Comprehensive ($995, which includes the other two).’ For the IT Comprehensive package, we can offer a layaway plan: a third down, another third in 30 days, then the balance required to be paid within sixty days. However, your account will not be created until full payment has been received. But by creating an invoice, you are entitled to any specials being offered at that time. Feel free to contact Ed Gans for any special training package. We are sure we can offer them to you at a commensurate discount.
Ed Gans adds, "We can set up a demo account where you can explore the system at no charge for about a week. We want you to know what we have to offer, how the classrooms operate, and discover whether you can allocate real-time hours to participate."
